Is There a Green Rational Deal?

Congressional Democrats propose a fantastically expensive plan to fix precisely nothing.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Excerpts:

"the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the accepted authority, has failed to improve upon a 40-year-old guesstimate that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would lift global temperature somewhere between 2.7 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

The IPCC does not claim this wide and baggy range is even reliable, only that it comports with a variety of computer simulations."

"If the world adopts the widely prescribed goal of holding temperature increase to 3.6 degrees above the preindustrial average, it might require forestalling 300 billion tons of future emissions—or perhaps 900 billion tons.

We might spend $2 trillion a year and avoid 6.3 degrees of additional warming—or maybe only 0.9 degrees."

"Government scientists, without being especially upfront about it, combined extreme worst-case assumptions both for future emissions and for how much warming might result from a given amount of emissions.

They came up with a shocking forecast of a U.S. temperature increase of 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2090. Even so, their estimate of the annual damage to the U.S. economy was a manageable $500 billion, or about 0.8% of national income assuming a meager 1.6% annual growth rate between now and then."